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VILLA SIENA

which meant Chris had the luxury of choosing whatever moniker he liked for the front of his plastic; he preferred “Chris Anderson” for the cards he used himself. On his computer, Chris edited Max’s dumps to make the name on the magstripe match the alias—conveniently, the name was the one piece of magstripe data not used in calculating the CVV security code, so it could be altered at will.

Finally, it was two swipes through the trusty MSR206 to program Max’s dump onto the magstripe, and Chris had a counterfeit credit card that duplicated in nearly every way the plastic nestled in a consumer’s wallet or purse somewhere in America.

He wasn’t done yet.

Driver’s licenses were a must for high-end purchases, and there, too, Chris’s assembly line and Shadowcrew’s tutorials got the job done. For licenses, he’d switch from PVC to Teslin, a thinner, more flexible material sold in 8½ x 11 inch sheets. It was one sheet for the front, another for the back, ten licenses to a sheet.

California licenses include two security features that took some extra hacking. One is a translucent image of the California state seal, set in a repeating pattern in the clear laminate over the face of the license. To simulate it, Chris used Pearl Ex, a fine colored powder sold at arts-and-crafts stores for less than three dollars a jar. The trick was to dust a sheet of laminate with a mix of gold and silver Pearl Ex, feed it into a printer loaded with a clear ink cartridge, and print a mirror image of the California pattern with the transparent ink. It didn’t matter that the ink was invisible—it was the heat from the print head he was after. When the sheet came out, the printer had heat-fused the pattern onto the surface, and the extra Pearl Ex was easily washed away in a cold rinse.

The ultraviolet printing on the face of the license was no more difficult. An ordinary ink-jet printer would do the trick, as long as one drained the ink from the cartridge reservoirs and replaced it with multicolored UV ink bought in tubes.

After all the dusting, printing, and washing, Chris was left with four